Read This: The guy behind the National Enquirer wants all journalism to be pro-Trump
American journalism is in a precarious position. Our president, for example, publicly decries our most treasured news sources as “fake” when they do any actual reporting, then gives White House press passes to outlets that sell bogus supplements and tell grieving parents that, no, their children actually weren’t killed at Sandy Hook. And then there’s billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled a lawsuit for Hulk Hogan in order to bankrupt a media company that said some things he didn’t like. It’s all chronicled in Nobody Speak: Trials Of The Free Press, a new documentary that’s one of the scariest films to come out this year.
And now there’s David Pecker. At first glance, he may not seem like a threat. As chief executive of American Media, Inc., he owns a fleet of tabloids and gossip magazines, including the National Enquirer, which is perhaps most famous for bringing Bat Boy into the world. The Enquirer’s never been a paragon of journalistic value, so it probably won’t surprise you to know that, as a personal friend of President Donald Trump, Pecker has refused to publish anything derogatory about the man. During the run-up to the election, you might’ve seen headlines about Ted Cruz’s “philandering” or Hillary Clinton’s “poor health” gracing its cover.
What should concern you is that Pecker may be on the verge of owning several more magazines, ones that actually carry a little more weight. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin writes in his new story, “The National Enquirer’s Fervor For Trump”:
Pecker is now considering expanding his business: he may bid to take over the financially strapped magazines of Time, Inc., which include Time, People, and Fortune. Based on his stewardship of his own publications, Pecker would almost certainly direct those magazines, and the journalists who work for them, to advance the interests of the President and to damage those of his opponents—which makes the story of the Enquirer and its chief executive a little more important and a little less funny.